


The Cuckoo Father

by anactoria



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst, Dream Sex, Episode: s07e17 The Born-Again Identity, M/M, Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 04:57:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5614744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anactoria/pseuds/anactoria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Season 7 AU. When Daphne Allen found a half-drowned amnesiac in the river, she did what any sensible person would and called the police. They identified him as Jimmy Novak, missing since 2008, and reunited him with his wife and daughter. But his memories refuse to return, and he can't shake the feeling that he belongs elsewhere.  Maybe it has something to do with the voice he hears in his dreams...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cuckoo Father

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Serie11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/gifts).



> Written for the 2015 [Dean/Cas Secret Santa](http://deancas-xmas.livejournal.com/) exchange, for [Serie11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/)'s prompt: _7x17 from 'Emmanuel's' pov bc he can hearing dean praying to him (even though he doesn't know its praying) but instead of being with some random (like ?? how did that even happen) he ends back with Amelia and Claire._ I think I managed to get a tiny bit of the alternate S9 you requested in there, too. ;) I hope you like it!
> 
> Many thanks to [viviansface](http://archiveofourown.org/users/viviansface/pseuds/viviansface) for the beta and encouragement. :)

These are the things he knows:

The surface temperature of the sun is 5778 Kelvin. It is comprised primarily of hydrogen and helium, with traces of oxygen and carbon and iron and neon. Its light takes eight minutes and nineteen seconds to reach the Earth. In four billion years’ time it will begin to die, will expand until it swallows Mercury and Venus and, eventually, Earth.

The second-closest star to this world, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 years away at the speed of light. Time dilation means that four years at light speed equate to seventeen years on Earth. Any human who traveled there would likely find his loved ones dead and gone on his return.

People think of the spaces between the stars as being empty, but they aren’t. Hydrogen and helium particles drift in the void; neutrinos, radiation and dust. Meteorites and endless pieces of cosmic debris.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life first appeared on its surface approximately a billion years after that. The first human beings, 1.9 million years ago.

Honey bees have been around longer.

He has always liked them.

He could recite these facts by rote, if anybody asked him to, but they don’t feel like things learned from a book. They are like things he has breathed through, touched, known with the whole of himself. He feels them in the way he thinks, perhaps, other people feel the birth of their children, or the years they were in college, or that winter when it snowed so deeply you couldn’t open the front door.

The rest of the time, the quality of memory eludes him.

These are the things he does not know:

The name of the tattered stuffed rabbit Claire Novak keeps on her bed, though she insists she is too old for toys. The store where he and Amelia bought it for her (he is told that they did); how old she was at the time; the reason that she keeps it.

The hotel in which he and Amelia stayed on their honeymoon sixteen years ago. Where they took Claire on her first vacation the year after that. What he is laughing at in the final photograph in the album, in which he stands on a sandy shore in the sunshine, his arm slung around Amelia’s shoulders, an icecream cone in his free hand.

The name of Amelia’s perfume. The way it smells on her hair. The memories it should call up when she passes him—always at a careful distance; no accidental touches—and leaves a hint of it hanging in the air.

The significance of the random phrases that sometimes make both Amelia and Claire double over, giggling, then fall silent with guilty sideways glances when they remember he is in the room and not laughing with them. Family jokes that he would have understood, once, that he maybe even started, but that now serve only as reminders of how he doesn’t fit into their lives.

He is a cuckoo in the nest; a puzzle piece in the wrong puzzle. The doctors tell him it’s possible his memories will return in time, but with no real clue as to the cause of his amnesia, they are unable to be more specific.

In the hospital, they talked, doubtfully, about head trauma. There were no obvious signs of that when he was brought in. Then they talked about other kinds of trauma, with shared looks and silences that made no sense to him until the police arrived.

James Novak had been missing for three years before he was found, half-drowned and with no idea who he was, by a woman in Colorado. The fact explains Claire’s resentment and Amelia’s cautious distance; but it tells him nothing, save that he is the kind of man who would abandon his family.

It might have been better for them had he stayed away. Sometimes he thinks it might have been better had Daphne Allen left him in the river where she found him, in the cold and the quiet; let him sink down into the black.

 

* * *

 

 

“That isn’t yours.”

He turns and finds Claire scowling at him from the doorway. She’s fifteen: all door-slams and eyeliner scowls, the childish openness she sometimes displays in Amelia’s presence tucked away whenever she realizes he is looking.

There are photographs of him holding her, a tiny scrunched-up red-faced thing, in the hospital where she was born. Photographs of him standing behind her as she blows out the candles on a birthday cake; steadying her on her first bicycle, his eyes shining with love and pride. He tries to feel it when he looks at her, now, but cannot reach it. All he feels is _sorry_.

“It doesn’t feel like it,” he agrees, and sets down the man’s wedding ring he is holding. The fine gold chain that holds it pools on the nightstand. He wasn’t wearing it when he disappeared, a fact whose significance he is not sure he grasps entirely.

Claire’s scowl deepens. “It isn’t yours, so you don’t get to touch it.”

He pulls his hand away before his mind takes conscious hold of the statement. Amelia must have worn this at some point—a memento, perhaps—but he hasn’t seen her do so since she first came to see him in the hospital. Now, it’s left out on the nightstand in her bedroom. He isn’t sure whether she is hoping he will reclaim it, or trying to distance herself from the husband she lost, better to deal with the one she has now.

Or the absence of one. Sometimes, there’s more in the sad way she looks at him than resignation to the fact he doesn’t remember. Something happened, before he lost his memories. It must have to do with those three years he was missing. He doesn’t think that Amelia would fully trust him even if his memories came flooding back tomorrow, and it makes him wonder if maybe she has good reason.

Claire is still watching him. “You’re not—” she starts to say, and then Amelia appears in the hallway behind her.

“Claire,” she warns. “Don’t speak to your father like that.”

Claire turns to look at her mother, and he can sense the glower even through the back of her head. She doesn’t say anything, just barges past Amelia and into her bedroom. Amelia stays where she is for a moment, giving him a helpless look. Then she turns and follows her daughter.

“He _talks_ different,” he hears, from Claire’s bedroom. “He talks like—” The door closes and he sighs, tramps down the stairs and out into the backyard in an effort to avoid eavesdropping.

Nothing here looks familiar, either, but at least the rosebushes and the overgrown lawn aren’t disappointed in him.

 

* * *

 

 

The first night the doctors let him come home, Amelia made up the spare bedroom for him. She has never asked him if he would prefer to share. He is grateful for the space, and he thinks that she feels the same way.

At night, he dresses himself in unfamiliar pajamas, curls up in the clean mismatched sheets, and tries to sleep.

It never comes easily.

The house is mercifully quiet now that Amelia and Claire are sleeping. When they are awake, their voices reach him through the walls, even when they are trying to keep their conversations from him—conversations about _delusions_ and _angels and demons_ and _those two weird guys_ that make less sense the harder he tries to understand. Now, there’s only the soft rise and fall of their breathing, the distant engine sound of an occasional passing car.

Something else, though, underlying it all. A faint sweet hum, high and crystalline and alive, that is with him always, a vibration in his bones as much as an audible sound.

He didn’t mention it in the hospital. Nor has he told Amelia about it. He doesn’t want more doctors looking in his ears, running brain scans—but more than that, it feels like a connection, somehow, this background noise of existence. Something in him fears losing it.

Perhaps that’s why he rarely sleeps, just lies staring at the ceiling, through the long hours until dawn. The idea of waking up to silence is horrifying in a way he doesn’t wholly understand.

Tonight, he doesn’t fall asleep, but after a while, he finds himself drifting. He isn’t unconscious, but nor is he truly in the spare bedroom of the Novak house. Something of his consciousness seems to float atop that silvery sound, to vibrate with it, the whole of it moving through him—or he through it; he cannot be sure. It’s like skating over the surface of the world, hearing the whole living sound of it beneath him.

From somewhere within it, a voice reaches him.

It’s rough, words slurring into one another as though the speaker has been drinking, and so startlingly close he thinks for a moment there must be somebody in the room with him and opens his eyes.

_The hell were you thinking?_ the voice says. _You shoulda come to us. Fuck, man, you shoulda come to_ me. _You shoulda—and now—fuck._ A pause. _You stupid sonofabitch._

There’s as much weariness in it as anger, he thinks, with a strange ache somewhere beneath his ribcage. No expectation of a reply.

A long silence, and then the voice again.

_I miss_ — it begins, and then goes quiet and stays quiet.

He lies restless through the remainder of the night. Rises with the dawn, and feels like an intruder when Amelia comes downstairs a half-hour later and starts at finding him in the kitchen.

 

* * *

 

 

The doctors say that if he recovers his memories, it will happen spontaneously, without treatment, but that exposure to familiar places and objects certainly can’t hurt. Possibly, they say this simply to make his family feel they can help; but in any case, that’s how he finds himself sitting at the dining room table in the middle of the afternoon, a box of Claire’s kindergarten drawings in front of him. Amelia brought them down and handed them to him, not quite looking him in the face, and then left him alone with them. He hears her move from room to room within the house, starting some task and then putting it down and beginning a new one, never settling.

There’s a yellow crayon sun in the corner of the drawing on top of the pile. A small child’s idea of a house, with four square windows and a squiggle of smoke emerging from the chimney. Three stick figures standing outside of it—a woman and a small girl with hair the same color as the sun, and a man in a long brown coat, who he assumes is supposed to be himself.

Amelia half-smiled as she gave the drawings to him; said, “I always hated that coat.” Something tugged vaguely at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t get hold of it, and he can’t recapture it now no matter how hard he stares.

The back door slams open, admitting a gust of wind from outside and a dishevelled Claire. She slings her bookbag over the back of a chair and takes an aborted step toward the refrigerator before she seems to register his presence. Then she stops and stares at him.

He attempts a smile. It doesn’t seem to have any effect.

“Did you have a good day at school, Claire?”

Claire turns abruptly on her heel, not walking away but putting her back to him, hands clenched in the sleeves of her jacket as she stares out into the backyard. “Don’t ask me stuff like that,” she says, after a moment. Her voice is strained. “Don’t talk to me like you’re my dad.”

He peers at her back, her small shoulders hunched forward and away from him.

She was young when he went missing; there are things she doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand them, either. He probably shouldn’t push her.

“What changed, Claire?” he hears himself ask, his voice as gentle as he can make it. “What makes you think I’m not—him?”

Claire spins to face him, eyes going wide, taking in a shaky breath. Her mouth opens around some retort—or maybe just a reply—and then he sees her gaze light on the drawing. She snaps her mouth shut, stalks toward the table, and snatches up the sheet of paper. It tears as she crumples it in her fist.

“Claire,” he says again, and then can’t find anything else to say.

She leaves the kitchen without another word, and a moment later, he hears the slam of her bedroom door.

Claire doesn’t emerge for the rest of the evening. He feels her anger anyway, humming through the walls of the house, the molecules of the air vibrating to its rhythm.

 

* * *

 

 

_I shoulda known something was wrong._

The voice is quieter tonight. Ragged with exhaustion, no anger in it. He’s glad of that. After the incident with Claire this afternoon, he isn’t sure he could handle any more.

_Should’ve asked_ , the voice in his head goes on. _I just—all that crap, man, it was above my pay grade. War in Heaven. What am I supposed to do with that?_ There is a sigh. _But I shoulda tried anyway. Must’ve been something I coulda done to help._

He cannot make sense of the words, but something in him aches to reassure. To wrap itself around the voice and whisper, _No, this is not your fault_ —for he knows that to be true, though he does not know why he knows it.

The voice doesn’t speak to him again that night. He drifts along on the hum of the world, through fragmented images that are not quite dreams, searching and not finding. What he is searching for, he doesn’t know, but there is an urgency to the search that he does not feel when he thinks about his lost memories, about the life that James Novak left behind.

When dawn comes, he finds himself with a new and unshakeable conviction: the voice in his head is not his voice, but it belongs to him. And, in some unknowable way, he belongs to it.

It is the first certain thing he has felt since he woke on the riverbank.

 

* * *

 

 

“Would you like to go for a walk?” Amelia asks him. Her expression is guarded; there is a significance to the question that eludes him.

“Of course,” he says. He has no reason to refuse. Something around her eyes lightens up at his answer, and she gives him a small, cautious smile.

She drives them out of town and pulls the car up beside a small lake. This is a picnic spot: a few wooden benches, mostly empty; a family eating sandwiches at the furthest one, sparing no more than brief glances in their direction. It’s quiet here. He can hear the birds singing. The surface of the lake glitters palely.

It is so still. He envies it.

He felt peaceful, he thinks, in the moments before Daphne Allen pulled him from the river. It was quiet there, in the space between drowning and waking. The voices of the world did not batter at his skull. Not even that voice he hears in his head, late at night, asked anything of him.

He was at peace there—but he was alone.

“Jimmy.” Amelia’s voice is gentle, but insistent. She must have been trying to get his attention for some time. It often takes him a moment to notice, when people call him by name.

He meets her eyes. “I’m sorry,” he offers. “It’s beautiful here.”

The smile she gives him is faint. She takes him by the arm, leading him away from the picnic benches and onto the trail that curves around the lakeside, but pulls her hand away again as soon as she is sure he is following her.

They walk in silence a while—ten minutes, maybe a little more. Amelia comes to a halt, then. It’s very quiet on this part of the trail, the wind shushing in the grass. A pair of birds pass overhead, their small high voices whipped away on the breeze. He smiles up at them.

When he lowers his eyes, he finds Amelia watching him again. There’s a spark in her eyes, something expectant that dims down when he meets them, when she realizes whatever she’s looking for in his face is absent.

“This was somewhere important,” he says. “To us.” It isn’t really a question, and Amelia nods.

“You proposed here,” she says, after a moment. “It was spring. Beautiful. I was so—” She breaks off there, lips pressed tightly together.

“I’m sorry,” he offers. Her answering smile is thin and streaked with tears.

That night, before they retreat to their separate bedrooms, she kisses his cheek. Her hands hover above his shoulders without touching. She lets them fall back to her sides, then, and turns away, closing the door of the master bedroom softly behind her.

 

* * *

 

 

That night, he dreams of other kisses.

The mouth that moves against his, hot and urgent, is certainly not Amelia’s. The hands on his skin are large, steady and capable, and if they sometimes hold him a little too tightly, he does not mind. And the voice in his ear, so close he can feel the speaker’s breath, is the voice from his dreams, low and rough and needy.

_Been wanting this so long_ , it says. _So long and I never told you. God, Cas, I never told you._

Cas. He couldn’t say where he has heard the name before, but it feels more familiar than _Jimmy_ , or _James_ , or _Mr. Novak_. Perhaps it was something he called himself while he was missing?

There are questions he knows he should be asking, but they get buried somewhere beneath the thrill of bodies touching in the dark. The sweet ache of it, sweeter than anything else he has known in this life since he woke up, sweeter than anything within the walls of this house. Shared breath, warm skin, and a whispered plea as he shudders with pleasure and the song of the world crescendos inside his head: _Don’t go. Don’t you leave me again._

He wakes to a sticky mess in his boxers and a sour tang of guilt that he cannot place.

In the bathroom, he cleans up and breathes in the cold night air. Somebody has left the window open a crack, and through it he sees a sliver of sky, hears the high cold singing of the stars.

They are so far away from him. The voice in his head, so close a few moments ago, is just as distant.

It takes him a moment to identify the ache that seizes his heart as he stands there. He has been told that this is the house in which Jimmy Novak has lived since he was a young man; that he has spent his whole life in this town. Yet he has never felt more homesick.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s December the next time Amelia takes him anywhere. They have found a kind of equilibrium, inhabiting the same home but leaving space for one another. Roommates who are cordial, if a little stiff. When she looks at him, it is no longer with hope in her eyes; though he thinks the fear has faded, too.

Claire still avoids speaking to him whenever possible. Sometimes, hearing the thin high note of pain beneath her anger, he thinks about reaching out to her—but he is at a loss for how to do so, and when he suggests it, Amelia looks doubtful, her gaze sliding away from his.

When Amelia asks him to accompany her in the car, she hands him a bouquet of white flowers. It is not entirely a surprise, then, when they arrive at the town cemetery, but he does not expect the names on the headstone until he reads them. Richard and Kamila Novak, who died in 2000 and 2009 respectively.

These must be Jimmy Novak’s parents. His mother died while he was missing.

Amelia gives him an encouraging nod, and numbly, he stoops to place the bunch of flowers atop the grave. It is still early in the morning, and frost clings to the grass, the earth hard as iron beneath his feet. He keeps his eyes down, unwilling to disappoint her with the absence of tears.

He feels the loss—but distantly, in the same way he might feel the death of an insect, the fall of a sparrow. The same way he might feel the loss of Amelia herself.

Sometimes, he feels a little less than human. Whatever happened during those lost years, it stripped something fundamental from him, left him with a hollowness like an ache at his core. He does not know how to love, except in his dreams.

 

* * *

 

 

“This one used to be your favorite.” Amelia nudges him with her foot under the table, and he blinks and refocuses on the Christmas music playing softly over her laptop speakers.

The tree lights twinkle softly in the corner of the room, stockings hung above the fireplace. They brought down the decorations from the attic this morning, and Amelia tried to coax Claire into helping hang them up.

It didn’t go well, Claire snapping, “We haven’t bothered in years, why do we have to be all festive just because _he’s_ here?” with a glare in his direction that made him take an involuntary step back. That led into another whispered conversation he tried not to hear through the walls, Claire’s insistence that _he isn’t Dad_ and Amelia talking about _trauma_ and _give him a chance_.

He busied himself with removing the tree ornaments from their tissue-paper wrappings, fragile glass baubles and candy canes and stars. A paper angel with a halo of pale gold around her head, fair hair tumbling down over her shoulders and great, iridescent white wings. He was absorbed enough in his task that he didn’t notice their footsteps on the stairs; only heard Claire’s short, bitten-off laugh behind him before she disappeared back up to her room.

Amelia gave him a pained little smile. “We should let her be,” she said, and picked up a tree ornament.

She put the Christmas music on ten minutes in—more to fill the awkward silence, he thinks, than out of any festive spirit.

_Peace on Earth_ , comes the voice through the speakers, _and mercy mild_  
_God and sinners reconciled_ —

He attempts to smile—to remember _why_ this song might have been his favorite—but its words of hope ring hollow, and after a moment, the smile drops off his face.

The words he longs for come only after dark, inside his head, and they are less and less frequent, these days. He still has those strange half-dreams, full of touches and kisses and breathless need; still feels the same dissatisfaction afterwards. But the voice that seems to sound close by his ear, to speak directly to his heart—that is fading away. When it does come, its words are laced with resignation.

It makes him feel like he is disappearing.

 

* * *

 

 

He goes through the motions of preparing for Christmas, shopping, peeling vegetables under Amelia’s direction, wrapping Christmas gifts for Claire. He hesitates when Amelia suggests he sign the labels, however. It doesn’t feel right; and besides, he is not sure how he should refer to himself. Neither _Jimmy_ nor _James_ feels like it belongs to him, but he is certain Claire would balk at _Dad_.

In the end, he leaves the label blank. The lumpy package conceals a stuffed cat with a pink oblong for a body, apparently extruding a rainbow from its rear end. He has no idea why it looks the way it does, but the heavily-pierced young man in the store assured him that _Chicks love this cra—uh, stuff_ , and for a brief, startling moment he heard those words in another voice and stared until the store assistant began to look nervous. Without knowing why, he felt certain it was something the voice he hears at night would say.

When she unwraps the package, Claire stares at the stuffed cat for a moment, her back to him. He expects her to set it down and ignore it, maybe even throw it in the trash, and he lowers his eyes, but when he looks back up, she is frowning at him. It isn’t her usual scowl—it’s something more thoughtful than that, the note of hurt he so often hears when she looks at him muted.

“Thanks,” she says, stiffly, and he does not know how to respond, so he just nods and begins collecting discarded wrapping paper off the floor. He doesn’t find the gift label among the debris, and when he looks up, he finds she is still holding it in her hands.

 

* * *

 

 

The Christmas lights are a sad sight in January. He welcomes Twelfth Night when it comes around.

To his surprise, Claire appears at his side as he is removing ornaments from the tree. She begins to untangle the fairy lights from the branches without saying anything, and they work in silence for a while, side by side.

“I,” she begins, after a few moments, then goes quiet again.

He waits.

“I just—thanks, okay? For not pretending.”

He blinks and turns to face her, but she isn’t looking at him, staring hard at her hands as she works. Still, he feels something ease, deep inside his chest—something he hadn’t even known was causing him pain before now.

“You’re welcome,” he offers, uncertain, and Claire gives a brief, tight smile.

“You’re still not my dad,” she says, then. “You know that, right?”

He blinks. Is silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he says then, softly. It feels like a confession.

Claire stills, the string of tree lights still wrapped around her hands, and glances sideways at him. “You don’t actually want to be here,” she tells him. She watches him for a moment, and he doesn’t think she is waiting for a denial. He isn’t sure he could find one in himself if she were.

“I sometimes think there’s somewhere else,” he admits. “Somewhere I’m supposed to be.” _Someone I’m supposed to be with_ , he doesn’t say, selfishly unwilling to share the voice inside his head. It feels like the only thing that is truly his.

Claire bites her lip and looks at him a moment longer before turning away. She starts to pack up the tree lights.

 

* * *

 

 

They still don’t talk much, after that, but Claire stops avoiding him. Sometimes, she even accompanies him when he goes out walking—a habit of Amelia’s that he has picked up, though he hasn’t actually gone anywhere with her since the cemetery. Claire is usually quiet, and he is grateful for that. He can listen to the sounds of nature, the song of the world; separate himself out from human voices and human worries.

He pulls up short when he catches himself thinking of himself as separate from humans. The thought came to him so easily. Perhaps that should make him uneasy.

The other thing he hears out here, though, is absence. The absence of that voice inside his head—its anger and its pain, its sorrow and need and love. He has not heard it since before Christmas, and now it is late January, the days gradually lengthening as winter slides toward spring. There is an ache at his core when he thinks about it, a tightness around his chest that he cannot imagine as anything other than human.

Today, they set out early. Fresh snow has fallen overnight, and this early on a Sunday morning, few footprints mar its surface. Their breath mists white before their faces, their footsteps muffled on the ground. As they reach the outskirts of town, a few flakes begin to fall.

Snowflakes are made from clear ice, but appear white in color, the tiny crystal facets within them reflecting the whole spectrum of light.

The thought comes to him out of nowhere, and he does not realize he has spoken it aloud until Claire turns to look at him and says, “How do you even know that?”

He frowns. “I don’t know. Did I ever study meteorology?” He thinks that the doctors, or Amelia, would have mentioned it if he had, but he is aware he has little grasp of the things most people consider important.

Claire’s smile is opaque, and for a moment he hears again the high thin note of her pain. “I don’t think so,” she says, and keeps walking.

He makes to follow, and then it hits him like a body blow.

It’s a tidal wave of grief—a moment of shock, and then despair too profound to be truly felt, vast and numbing. A great silence.

An image surfaces in his mind. A hospital bed with an occupant he does not recognise—a man with a graying beard, surrounded by beeping machines and frantic doctors and nurses. And the voice inside his head, low and desperate, saying only, _Please_.

It is only when Claire turns back, then quickens her pace toward him, her face etched with worry, that he realizes he is on his knees in the snow. His face is wet, his tears gone cold in the wind.

That night, he hears the voice again. It has turned hard and bitter.

_You did this_ , it tells him. _You brought them here. This is on you—you_ — It breaks off, softens. _Please_ , it says again, and then a sigh, and then silence.

He feels the other’s presence, so close to him he is almost certain he could open his eyes and find the dream turned real. The heat of a body, the faint tremor of a bone-deep exhaustion.

On other occasions, he has always waited to be touched, fearful that if he makes the first move he will break the spell, make the voice and its owner disappear. Now, he screws up his courage and reaches out in the dark, shivering when his fingertips find skin. A stubbled cheek; the bolt of a jaw; soft lips that part at his touch.

When he opens his eyes, he is somewhere else. The room is unfamiliar, the furniture in all the wrong places, and through the gap in the curtains, the lights of passing cars streak along the wall. He is sitting on one of two single beds. In the other, somebody sleeps curled away from him, a faceless lump under the blankets.

Lips brush the palm of his hand, then, and he turns back to face the man whose voice he dreams of.

His heart catches in his throat.

Not simply because the man is beautiful, though he is—long-lashed eyes that glimmer with unshed tears in the dark, broad shoulders and strong arms, a full mouth that begs to be kissed—but because he knows with sudden certainty that this is real and right like nothing in his waking life. He _knows_ this man, and this man knows him, and the thought is like light blossoming inside his chest, like his own private starbirth.

“I know you’re just a dream,” the man says, then. “I know you never—I know you just—” A pause, the man ducking his head. “I guess that’s why I don’t wanna punch you in the face right now.” The earlier bitterness is gone; there is only sorrow shining back at him from this man’s eyes.

“Tell me what to do,” he begs. “Tell me how to help you.”

The man almost laughs—a short, mirthless sound—then scrubs his hand across his face. “You can’t help,” he says. “That’s the problem, ain’t it? You coulda helped, once, you coulda saved him, but—you’re gone.”

“I’m here now.”

The man shakes his head, an unreadable series of expressions passing over his face. “You’re just—” He stops. Sighs, then turns back. He holds himself still for a moment, struggling with some internal conflict, then closes his eyes. “Just be here,” the man says, then. It’s so quiet, barely more than a breath. “’S all I ever asked. Just be here.”

He nods. Leans in, and their lips brush.

The kiss is sweet and slow, tentative despite all the other times they have touched like this in dreams. It has never been this vivid before. Just fragments—an image, a brush of hands, words whispered in the dark. This is different. The two of them, together and whole—as whole as he remembers ever being. Seeing clearly, sharing breath, moving together in the darkness.

He expects desperation, but doesn’t find it. The man’s hands move over his skin gently, almost reverently—as though the man is uncertain of his presence here, afraid that believing this will make it end.

He can sympathize. He doesn’t dare close his eyes, through any of it—the heat uncoiling low in in his belly as they sink down together atop the narrow mattress; the fumble of hands pulling aside clothing; the warmth of the man’s hand as it curls around his erection. The rush of relief when he comes, and the warm spark of pride when he feels the man’s breath stutter, cock jerking in his hand, and his eyes flutter closed as he follows. The endless kisses that leave him breathless and overwhelmed and whole.

They don’t speak much more, and what stays with him afterward is that word again—that name—gasped out against his shoulder in the dark.

Cas. He has never heard it spoken in the real world, but he knows, deep and certain, that it is him.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s walking home from the corner store when it happens.

The road is still icy, and an old man hobbles across it, leaning heavily on his stick. He’s slow—he has no chance of dodging out of the way when the car rounds the corner. Cas sees the horror on the driver’s face, hears the shriek of brakes, but the car skids and doesn’t stop.

The impact sounds too quiet—just a dull thump, and the old man flies through the air and hits the asphalt in a crumpled heap.

That’s when he hears the voice again.

_You coulda saved him_ , it says, and some long-buried instinct awakens in him. It carries him over to the man’s body before he has time to think about what he’s doing, and he even beats the driver there.

The old man’s eyes are closed, a dark thread of blood trickling from one side of his mouth. The driver turns pale, putting her hand to her face. “Oh God,” he hears her say, distantly. “Oh God.”

Some internal force seems to compel him, and without knowing what he is doing, he places his hand on the old man’s forehead. He thinks that maybe he just means to close the old man’s eyes—and then something buzzes hot and bright through his veins, and light pulses out of him.

Above him, he hears the driver’s sharp gasp. The old man lies still for a moment longer.

Then he coughs and opens his eyes.

“What—” Cas hears someone say. “Did you see—?”

He ignores the voice and extends a hand. The old man blinks up at him. Then he takes it and lets himself be hauled upright, walking the few steps to the sidewalk without the aid of his cane.

A knot of people has begun to form around them. A siren sounds distantly. There is a burst of chatter, and somewhere in it Cas hears the world _miracle_. From the corner of his eye, he sees the flash of a camera.

 

* * *

 

 

When the calls start coming, Amelia and Claire agree that it’s a good idea for him to use a pseudonym.

_Cas_ sits on the tip of his tongue, but he doesn’t quite dare speak it aloud. The idea feels a little wrong, like putting something sacred on display in a store window. It is Amelia who chooses _Emmanuel_ for him, and though its connotations make him a little uncomfortable, he cannot raise an argument strong enough to refuse.

Claire, at least, seems to feel easier once she has something else to call him. Amelia eyes him uneasily, some strange mix of disappointment and the old fear in her eyes, though she never speaks of it when he is in the room. He would like to reassure her, but cannot bring himself to try.

What he did after that accident was unnatural. Some might call it _miracle_ , but sometimes, in the back of his mind, he hears the echo, _monster_.

But people come to him for help, and he cannot turn them away. He does the best he can, and they leave healed and grateful, some of them proclaiming that he has restored their faith in Heaven. He does not know why the idea makes him bitter—except maybe that he cannot help the one person he knows truly needs it.

There are no more vivid dreams, no more nights of shared kisses and touches. He hears the voice inside his head rarely, and it grows fainter and sadder and tireder every time.

 

* * *

 

Spring is beginning to make itself felt, the weather mild enough and the snow cleared away enough to take longer walks. Cas is hanging up his jacket in the hallway when he sees the silhouette outside the front door.

Clients come to the house, sometimes. Despite the pseudonym and the hastily-constructed website, well-meaning neighbors sometimes direct their family members here, and those who Cas has healed can hardly be stopped from passing his address on to their friends. He opens the door before the knock comes, intending to explain that he doesn’t normally work on weekends but will help if he is able, and the visitor’s face stops him dead.

It is a wormy, black-eyed deathmask, the face of a horror-movie monster. He stares at it in shock for a long moment before instinct kicks in.

The creature lunges at him and he blocks its blow; ducks into its space and presses his hand to its forehead. Light pulses out of him, and the creature seizes and falls to the floor.

When he steps back, it looks like an ordinary human man again—but for the smoking holes where its eyes used to be.

“Cas?”

He blinks in surprise, still dazed, not daring to believe what he hears.

“Cas!”

The voice from his dreams, but more distant and nearer at the same time. It normally sounds right up close, in his ear, but this—

There’s a noise outside: the front garden gate closing. And when he peers out of the front door, the man from his dream is staring at him, his green eyes wide with shock.

Neither of them speaks. Cas is still breathing hard.

This is the most important thing that has happened to him since he was pulled out of the river. He knows this, with utter certainty—and he has no idea what to say. He stands frozen on the spot.

“ _You?_ ”

Cas blinks at the sound of Amelia’s horrified voice. Turns, and finds her and Claire both behind him in the doorway, staring at the man from his dream. She looks as though she has seen a ghost.

Claire touches her shoulder, her expression resigned. “Mom,” she says. “We knew this was gonna happen.”

Amelia shakes her head minutely, but she ducks back into the house without further argument. Distantly, through the walls, Cas hears the sound of her weeping.

The man from his dreams is still staring at him. When Cas meets his eyes again, he shakes himself, swallows hard, and says, “So, _you’re_ ‘Emmanuel’?”

Cas blinks. So much of him aches to run to this vision made flesh, wrap around him and kiss him and whisper _sorry_ s and promises into his skin.

Instead he stands on the doorstep for a long moment, then inclines his head in something like a nod. “My name is James Novak,” he says, and his voice sounds stiff and strange. “Or so I’m told.”

The man from his dreams stares at him a moment longer. Something like understanding seems to dawn on him then, and he draws himself upright, hands curling into fists at his sides. “Huh,” he says. “Uh, sure. Look, I—” The man breaks off, looks down at his hands. “I need your help. Or—well, my brother needs your help.”

He watches Cas’s face carefully, as though expecting some reaction, and seems to deflate a little when he doesn’t get it.

Cas would do anything to wipe that disappointment from his face. But he does not know where it comes from, so he lifts his chin and says the only thing he can: “Of course I’ll help you.”

 

* * *

 

 

The drive to Indiana is awkward, and made mostly in silence—nothing like the intimacies he has dreamed of.

He attempts conversation only once. “You called me _Cas_ ,” he says, and the man from his dreams gives a too-familiar bitter laugh.

“Yeah,” he says. “Guess you reminded me of someone for a minute there.”

Cas regards him curiously. “This Cas,” he says. “He was a friend?”

The man stares at the road before them. “Yeah,” he says, shortly. “He was.”

“He left?” Cas puts his head on one side, watching the man’s stony expression, trying to ignore the pang he feels at his heart. “Or he—did something to hurt you?”

“Ain’t me I’m worried about.” That is all the man offers, so Cas changes tack.

“I don’t know your name,” he realizes. He agreed to leave with this man without even stopping to ask. Neither Amelia nor Claire seemed surprised by that, which should confuse him further, though Claire made sure to press his cellphone into his hands before he left.

“Dean,” the man says. “Winchester.”

Cas thinks maybe he is being tested for a reaction—but there is no flood of memory, no glorious revelation. Only the simple realization that he already knew.

They stop for gas the next morning and leave again with a third passenger, a woman whose face is _wrong_ in the same way as that of the monster who came to the door. Dean, however, seems to think she is not a danger, and she eyes Cas with a mixture of amusement and pity that tells him she knows him, too.

She and Dean argue in whispers when they think he is not listening, and he tries not to hear them, but can’t help but catch scraps of conversation. _You know what he did_ , he hears. _He could… disappear._

(The voice in his dream. _Just be here. That’s all I ever asked._ )

Cas squares his shoulders, and turns to face them.

 

* * *

 

 

The trenchcoat belonged to Jimmy Novak. Castiel realizes that when Dean pulls it from the trunk of his car and the image of Claire’s crayon drawing flashes before his eyes.

He hesitates when Dean holds it out to him. He remembers, now, what his presence did to the Novaks; what a monster he must surely be in their eyes. Claire’s resentment and Amelia’s denial are easy to understand, their gradual acceptance of him, less so. Perhaps it would not be right to take it.

But Dean says, “This is yours,” and it feels like the first step toward forgiveness, and so he holds out his hands and takes it.

 

* * *

 

 

It is much later—after Purgatory; after Naomi; after he loses his grace; after Sam closes the gates of Hell and almost dies in the process—that he dares speak to Dean of the time he spent with the Novaks.

Claire still sends him text messages, from time to time. Some part of her seems compelled to check up on him, though she has always known he is not her father. He has not heard from Amelia since he left, but he suspects that is probably for the best.

He finds Dean in the library of the bunker, a glass of whiskey at his side, eyes half closed, head threatening to loll forward onto the table. Sam is sleeping—something he does for about twelve hours a day, at the moment, and Dean seems determined to spend every moment of that time worrying that his brother will not wake up.

Castiel cannot blame him. Dean has lost quite enough already.

Gently, he touches Dean between his shoulder blades, sitting down in the chair beside him. He’s a little tired himself, his shoulders beginning to ache. The small discomforts of being human still take him by surprise. He thought he might never recover from the journey to the bunker, made via hitched rides and public transport that Claire booked for him on the internet, sleeping cramped into car seats and surviving on the snack supplies of kindly strangers. It is all so different from the first time he thought himself human.

Perhaps it is that that makes the memory spring to mind; or perhaps it is simply that he wants to give Dean something to take his mind off Sam.

“I had dreams, sometimes,” Castiel says. “When I thought I was Jimmy.”

Dean blinks and straightens up, eyeing him curiously. “Yeah?” he says. “I didn’t think angels could. Dream. I mean, you still didn’t need to sleep, right?”

Castiel gives a tiny shake of his head. Pauses for a long moment before continuing. “I’m not sure they were _my_ dreams,” he says, at last.

Dean’s eyes widen, and for a moment Castiel fears that he has overstepped his bounds. “They were just dreams,” Dean says—but he doesn’t stand up and stomp off to some other part of the bunker, doesn’t shutter himself away and end the conversation, and Castiel realizes that that was not a denial.

He wets his lips. “I heard your voice sometimes, too,” he says. “I didn’t know who you were, but I could hear your prayers.”

“Yeah?” Dean isn’t meeting his eyes. He blinks rapidly. “Must’ve been pretty confusing.”

“No,” Castiel says, and Dean raises his eyes again. “I knew very little, then, but I knew that I wished to help you. To give you what you wanted.”

Dean snorts. “Well, back then I probably wanted to put a fist in your face, so, y’know. Good thing you weren’t around.”

He doesn’t even laugh at his own joke, and Castiel reaches up, caresses the side of his face. Dean gives a sharp little intake of breath, but doesn’t pull away.

“If I could heal Sam more quickly, I would,” Castiel tells him. “But I can’t. I can just—be here.” He swallows. “You asked that of me, once.”

It’s a question as much as it is a statement, and Dean leaning into his touch is all the answer he needs.

Castiel brings their lips together, and it is the last talking they do for a long time.

 

* * *

 

 

These are the things he knows:

Claire Novak is seventeen years old. She sends Castiel text messages telling him about her schoolwork, about the girl she is dating and the movies she watches and the college she wishes to go to, and occasionally that she hates him. The last kind usually come with an emoticon that, he is reliably informed, means the statement is not true. He does not think she knows quite why she does it, but he is glad of it.

Sam Winchester has broken the world, and he has saved it. He knows all the names of Ted Bundy’s victims, and has nightmares of all the other victims he has been unable to save, and occasionally sneaks bits of junk food out of the refrigerator when he thinks Dean isn’t looking.

Dean Winchester has broken the world, and he has saved it. Like his brother, he rarely sleeps without nightmares, though he has been able to do so more frequently of late. During the small hours of the night, he often drinks himself unconscious or watches television, but he has also read his way through a good quarter of the Men of Letters’ library. He would never admit as much to Sam. He is surprisingly houseproud. He knows far too many quotes from far too many movies, and his jokes make Claire groan when Castiel relays them to her.

The angel Castiel has broken the world, and he has saved it. The Winchesters have broken him, and they have saved him.

He has seen the deepest oceans and the farthest galaxies, the birth of stars and the beginnings of life crawling from the primordial ooze, and yet he cannot think of any place he would rather be than here.

The sun above and the distant stars will burn on long after his human life is ended. The Earth will continue to turn without him. Someday, his flesh and bones will go back to the soil. He will feed the flowers that feed the honeybees. The song of the world plays on, though he no longer hears it.

The vast distances between the stars, the great timescale of life on Earth—those things are abstract to him, now. They were his memories once, but he has other memories now—small, human memories that are infinitely more precious. The rueful smile Sam gives when Castiel shakes him awake over his books and tells him to go to bed. The way Dean’s shoulder bumps against his own before they jump into a fight; the way Dean looks at him, late at night, as they fall asleep curled toward one another in the bedroom they share.

He has a home, and he will always find his way back to it.

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read this far and you love the angst (which seems likely if you have), I'd like to rec Enochian Things' wonderful -- and criminally under-read -- 7x17 fic, [I Hear the Voices When I'm Dreaming](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4999648). I read it shortly before getting my Secret Santa prompts, and don't think I could help being influenced by it in writing this. So go, check it out!


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